Feeds and Other Alternative Optimization Opportunities

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.com was up first. He shows a slide of news search, vertical search, local, blog and social search, as they are used more and more by agencies and marketers. MarketingSherpa tested the tactic known as SEO PR. They gave the task to his son, the college intern, to create an optimize versus not optimize release, and test it on different news service engines. That was the test. They made mistakes; optimized for one word, he also optimized for the singular version of plural releases (so he changed the test cases). the results turned out that the unoptimized released, ranked higher than the unoptimized. The publicity generated 8 times more visitors than the 2 releases themselves. The SherpaStore.com's unique visitors were 10.5% higher. The blog generated 30x more visitors than the article. Using the most popular keyword is not always the best strategy. Press and blog mentions can generate traffic also. It is your news that generates coverage. Do not be surprised if the traffic comes from blogs than news articles.

Amanda Walington from SearchingForProfit.com RSS can be seen in many places, including web sites, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, etc. Build your feeds right from the start... How many feeds are appropriate? How much content is needed to keep the feed fresh and attractive (she likes full content feeds). How much of each content should be included in the feed? Updating feeds, tracking stats of feeds. RSS is not just for blogs, affiliate communication, media and commercial distribution, syndicating content, new product announcements, job openings, press rooms, investors, etc. Who is using feeds creatively? She shows titlist.com. Target.com is using it. Optimize your feeds, use keywords, write descriptions as if your are writing it for a directory, use full paths on links, each feed should have a keyword theme, use images, etc. She explains you need to pay attention to details of the feed spec. Blog optimization: optimize the templates, use the plugins, write powerful keyword rich posts, socialize your blog, use tags and clouds, submit to blog search engines and make it easy to subscribe. SEO Tips for Podcasts; optimize the audio file, building landing pages, build accurate RSS, submit broadly, watch for changes. SEO Tips for Video; fill out all the info, use tags consistently, make sure that your feeds work if you include video back into your site, submit broadly, and create landing pages. MySpace, it is all about social networking, she shows examples of MySpace profiles. Second Life, when one life is not enough (very interesting), she shows optimization methods for second life.

Todd Malicoat aka Stuntdubl is now up. He starts with a story. The self-perpetuating buzz, links and traffic snowball. Link baiting via Netscape and Digg. Some link baiting will bomb. No matter how good your link bait is, it may fail. Digg is now in the top 100 sites, and these guys are thought leaders, he says (some may argue with that). You need about 30 - 50 votes within a 24 hour period to make it to the home page. Your title is incredibly important. After that, the content in the click through is important or else you will drop. Make sure you add friends on Digg. Vote on your friends stuff. Don't submit your own stories, ask your friends to submit it for you, and then make that push. Don't bash Steven Colbert, dont attempt to sell to diggers and dont post your own release. He said, one oh his stories he spent 3 days writing, got over a 1,000 diggs but over 1,500 links - which is huge. Netscape comes from the bottom up. You need less friends to help you out there. Smaller site but still pretty good. Top 6 quality indicator of link value are the theme value, power source, outbound links and so on. Social media for traffic include del.ico.us, technorarti, reddit, and stumbleupon. Del.ico.us you need about 30 bookmarks within 24 hours. With Technorarti use one or two very specific phrases and also one generic. Reddit is a cross between digg and del.iou.us. StumbleUpon is kinda random he said, it is a toolbar you download. Social media for reputation, based on Graywolf's post. You want your top 10 results for your name to all be positive. He shows LinkedIn also, then Naymz.com (they give you a free PPC listing), squido and technorati claim your blog.

Last up is Greg Hartnett from Best of Web. He does not have a PPT, which is ok. He explains it is import to submit to all popular directories but he wanted to present alternatives. He explains that you need to visualize your site a node on the net, part of something bigger. He loves Flickr, the photo sharing site. You can drive some interesting "juices" to your site from Flickr. He recommends joining Flickr groups, adding notes, and tags, and keywords. He shows a Google Video he uploaded of his son in a hockey fight, his son is so young, the move is JR hockey fight (so cute). The video was viewed almost a million times on various sites. He said that commenting on blogs in a meaningful and productive manner, you can piggy back on the blog's traffic. StumleUpon has an advertising product, that he uses and it drives nice traffic he said. You can not trick people into this...